The Gin Closet
Free Press (February 16, 2010)

In the late 1960’s, Tilly Rudolph abandons her middle-class home in the suburbs and flees to the seedy underworld of Reno.  She stays away for decades, working as a prostitute, nursing various addictions, and eventually drinking herself to the brink of death in a dusty trailer park.  One day, after nearly thirty years without a family, her niece Stella shows up on her doorstop from New York City and changes both their lives forever.  The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between them, shifting between their perspectives as they move to San Francisco to make a home with Abe, Tilly’s overworked and melancholic son, building a fragile triangle that soon breaks under its own weight.

Written with an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love and power, The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.

‘In this gorgeous first novel, Leslie Jamison tells the tale of women caught in a chaos of drives and desires, seeking new meaning in our most ancient relations…With language as smart and sensuous as you’ll find anywhere, Jamison nails the nervous borders of our new future brilliantly.’
Charles D’Ambrosio, author of The Dead Fish Museum

‘Leslie Jamison is a brutal writer—an unflinching, wrenchingly gorgeous writer… Her attention to the sounds of words and the rhythms of sentences is a poet’s attention, this whole stunning novel built, filament by filament, like the most intricate, and kaleidoscopic of poems.  This novel hurts, and it hurts passionately, and so exquisitely beautifully that it’s impossible to look away.’
Thisbe Nissen, author of Osprey Island

You can buy the book from Amazon here or from Simon and Schuster here.